We conclude that sensory substitution and synaesthesia are independent of each other and thus, the 'artificial synaesthesia' view of sensory substitution should be rejected.The majority of emotional expressions used in daily communication are multimodal and dynamic in nature. Consequently, one would expect that human observers utilize specific perceptual strategies to process emotions and to handle the multimodal and dynamic nature of emotions. However, our present knowledge on these strategies is scarce, primarily because most studies on emotion perception have not fully covered this variation, and instead used static and/or unimodal stimuli with few emotion categories. To resolve this knowledge gap, the present study examined how dynamic emotional auditory and visual information is integrated into a unified percept. Since there is a broad spectrum of possible forms of integration, both eye movements and accuracy of emotion identification were evaluated while observers performed an emotion identification task in one of three conditions audio-only, visual-only video, or audiovisual video. In terms of adaptations of perceptual strategies, eye movement results showed a shift in fixations toward the eyes and away from the nose and mouth when audio is added. Notably, in terms of task performance, audio-only performance was mostly significantly worse than video-only and audiovisual performances, but performance in the latter two conditions was often not different. These results suggest that individuals flexibly and momentarily adapt their perceptual strategies to changes in the available information for emotion recognition, and these changes can be comprehensively quantified with eye tracking.To control hand movement, we have both vision and proprioception, or position sense. The brain is known to integrate these to reduce variance. Here we ask whether older adults integrate vision and proprioception in a way that minimizes variance as young adults do, and whether older subjects compensate for an imposed visuo-proprioceptive mismatch as young adults do. Ten healthy older adults (mean age 69) and 10 healthy younger adults (mean age 19) participated. Subjects were asked to estimate the position of visual, proprioceptive, and combined targets, with no direct vision of either hand. After a veridical baseline block, a spatial visuo-proprioceptive misalignment was gradually imposed by shifting the visual component forward from the proprioceptive component without the subject's awareness. Older subjects were more variable than young subjects at estimating both visual and proprioceptive target positions. Older subjects tended to rely more heavily on vision than proprioception compared to younger subjects. However, the weighting of vision vs. proprioception was correlated with minimum variance predictions for both older and younger adults, suggesting that variance-minimizing mechanisms are present to some degree in older adults. Visual and proprioceptive realignment were similar for young and older subjects in the misalignment block, suggesting older subjects are able to realign as much as young subjects. These results suggest that intact multisensory processing in older adults should be explored as a potential means of mitigating degradation in individual sensory systems.While stimulus complexity is known to affect the width of the temporal integration window (TIW), a quantitative evaluation of ecologically highly valid stimuli has not been conducted. We assumed that the degree of complexity is determined by the obviousness of the correspondence between the auditory onset and visual movement, and we evaluated the audiovisual complexity using video clips of a piano, a shakuhachi flute and human speech. In Experiment 1, a simultaneity judgment task was conducted using these three types of stimuli. The results showed that the width of TIW was wider for speech, compared with the shakuhachi and piano. Regression analysis revealed that the width of the TIW depended on the degree of complexity. In the second experiment, we investigated whether or not speech-specific factors affected the temporal integration. We used stimuli that either contained natural-speech sounds or white noise. The results revealed that the width of the TIW was wider for natural sentences, compared with white noise. Taken together, the width of the TIW might be affected by both the complexity and speech specificity.The crossmodal correspondence between auditory pitch and visuospatial elevation (in which high- and low-pitched tones are associated with high and low spatial elevation respectively) has been proposed as the basis for Western musical notation. One implication of this is that music perception engages visuospatial processes and may not be exclusively auditory. Here, we investigated how music perception is influenced by concurrent visual stimuli. Participants listened to unfamiliar five-note musical phrases with four kinds of pitch contour (rising, falling, rising-falling, or falling-rising), accompanied by incidental visual contours that were either congruent (e.g., auditory rising/visual rising) or incongruent (e.g., auditory rising/visual falling) and judged whether the final note of the musical phrase was higher or lower in pitch than the first. Response times for the auditory judgment were significantly slower for incongruent compared to congruent trials, i.e., there was a congruency effect, even though the visual contours were incidental to the auditory task. These results suggest that music perception, although generally regarded as an auditory experience, may actually be multisensory in nature.Eating disorder tendencies are psychological characteristics that are prevalent in healthy young females and are known to be among the risk factors for eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia nervosa. People with greater eating disorder tendencies strongly associate sweet and fatty foods with weight gain and strictly avoid consuming such foods. https://www.selleckchem.com/products/plerixafor.html However, little is known about how eating disorder tendencies influence the association between taste and body shape impression. Research on crossmodal correspondences suggests that people preferentially associate sweet tastes with round shapes, and individual differences affect the degree of such associations. This study investigates how the degree of taste-shape matching is related to eating disorder tendencies with a preliminary investigation of what mediates this relationship. Two experiments were conducted in Experiment 1, healthy participants rated the degree of association between basic taste words (sweet/sour/salty/bitter) and roundness of shape and subsequently completed questionnaires addressing eating disorder tendencies.